Dawn Powell (1896–1965) wrote novels about the artist’s struggle for recognition. Her own struggle for it and the recent recovery of her work make a poignant story. I have heretofore been reluctant to accept the idea that a full-fledged Powell revival is in progress. By now, though, the evidence has piled up. Her books have continued to be reissued throughout this decade, and her name now pops up in literary reviews when the subject is undeservedly forgotten writers making a comeback. Then, too, the indefatigable Tim Page has built up a head of steam in his noble crusade to bring Dawn Powell to the attention of the reading public.
As Page points out in Dawn Powell: A Biography, the Ohio-born Powell is a resolutely autobiographical writer.[1] Nearly all of her fifteen novels have to do with the sensitive Midwesterner’s yearning–sometimes fulfilled, sometimes not—for a wider world of culture. She came to New York City to seek her fortune in 1918, married, had a child, and lived in Greenwich Village for the rest of her days. Yet her view of New York was perpetually that of a newcomer because she played and replayed in her imagination the arrival in the big city of the scruffy but hopeful provincial.
From 1925 onward, Powell diligently published stories, novels, and plays, and by 1942 her editor was Max Perkins of Charles Scribner’s Sons, she was contributing fiction to The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, and Collier’s, and movie
